Interested in all things related to reading in print, reading on screens.

With the recent intense interest surrounding the Apple Watch and what it might or might not do (I can hardly wait to see one in person), more general questions about wearable technology in daily life are going to be inevitable in the coming months. With apps and devices enabling us to track our steps taken, miles covered, hours slept, and calories burned — could our wearable devices not start measuring more cognitive functions? What if wearable tech — smart glasses, for example — track how and what we read? The New Scientist (“Fitbit for the mind: Eye-tracker watches your reading”) mentions some intriguing new research on this front:

Google Glass and reading?

“‘ A cognitive activity tracker’ developed by Kai Kunze at Osaka Prefecture University in Japan can tell how many words we read how often and how fast we read, and even whether we are skim reading or actually concentrating on the content. It could also generate summaries of documents as you read them by logging which passages your eyes dwell on … Kunze is taking the technology in a different direction. In tests on volunteers wearing infrared eye-tracking glasses, his team found that their software could count the number of words read with an accuracy of about 94 per cent, and tell how fast you were reading, purely by looking at the movement of the eyes. By asking their volunteers to read different types of materials – novels, fashion magazines, newspapers, research papers and textbooks – they have shown that these various media can be discerned near perfectly from the way readers’ eyes move around their telltale layouts.”

Thus far, we’ve seen the most research devoted to eye tracking and advertising and marketing and even video games (for example, check out this eye-opening post from KISSMetrics). But the possibilities for delving into our reading habits are so intriguing. Could eye-tracking glasses lend insight into what we read, how long we read, what keeps us engrossed, and what causes our attention spans to wander? The applications for education are even more encouraging —

“Or, says Kunze, publishers could work out if textbook designs need rethinking by seeing how readers navigate their pages. If the software knows what the document is – a novel being read on a Kindle, say – then more advanced features can be used. ‘It could lead to adaptive reading materials in which the computer recognises I have trouble understanding a particular word and changes the text in real time to give me the definition in the next sentence,'”

Could this kind of adaptive reading content and those kinds of insight in turn influence our reading habits? I think it could. I use a Fibit, and that subtle nudge of how many steps left till the 10,000 step goal usually is reminder enough to take the stairs instead of the elevator — could a similar nudge encourage more reading time?Kobo’s Reading Life deserves credit for being one of the first to make a push into reading data — and this might just be the beginning.

There’s so much more information about our reading habits online now, it’s tantalizing to think about the possibilities. Jordan Ellenberg (Wall Street Journal: “The Summer’s Most Popular Book is …”) had a clever use for Amazon’s Popular Highlights feature, while coining the phrase, “the Hawking Index*” about what Kindle users are — and aren’t reading:

“How can we find today’s greatest non-reads? Amazon’s “Popular Highlights” feature provides one quick and dirty measure. Every book’s Kindle page lists the five passages most highlighted by readers. If every reader is getting to the end, those highlights could be scattered throughout the length of the book. If nobody has made it past the introduction, the popular highlights will be clustered at the beginning.

Thus, the Hawking Index (HI): Take the page numbers of a book’s five top highlights, average them, and divide by the number of pages in the whole book. The higher the number, the more of the book we’re guessing most people are likely to have read. (Disclaimer: This is not remotely scientific and is for entertainment purposes only!)”

The results: 775-page The Goldfinch (surprisingly to me) was one of the most-finished reads, while 696-page Capital in the Twenty-First Century was the least finished on the list. It makes some sense that fiction — and perhaps especially serial fiction with their built-in cliffhangers and delayed narrative gratification — would see greater completion rates than nonfiction. What does all of this mean? Probably nothing without a bigger sample size of books, but it’s still neat to think about. I wonder if in the not-distant future, that kind of data about reading habits could influence the decision-making process of book publishers.

“like any big business, publishing must always center on the mass: What do the most people want? What will the most people buy? What do people respond to? Between these two, there is a strange relationship. Companies collect and analyze this data, but rarely do readers get to see it.“

From a social perspective, I do find interesting what passages carry resonance with a large number of readers. But in my own Kindle reading, I usually opt for turning Popular Highlights off because of the potential for distraction. It’s more than a little possible that there is a mirror neurons kind of effect going on; perhaps our eye is drawn towards those passages that others have highlighted because it feels more significant because of that appearance of social importance. On some level, we probably can’t help but look more closely at the passage that says “4000 other people highlighted this part of the book” as opposed to “11 other people highlighted this part of the book.”

Trivia: attention span of goldfish is 9 seconds

I do wonder about our collective attention spans, and how our reading habits are being shaped by the various forms in which we are now reading our books.

Science Fracture (The Rise of Short Fiction) also has some observations on Kindle Singles and the role it might contribute in shaping our reading habits — but if in fact our attention spans are gravitating towards shorter forms of content, why do longer form books (think: the Game of Thrones series and a combined 4000-plus pages and counting) remain so popular?

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* Because apparently, A Brief of History of Time is the book everyone says they’re going to read but never do.**

So what do we mean when we say a book is “difficult”? The Atlantic (“Readability is a Myth“) had some interesting thoughts on the topic —

“First, I think it’s more true to the experience of reading to see “difficult” as wrapped up in evaluation of “bad,” rather than as separate. Most people are willing to admit, even if grudgingly, that aesthetic quality is to some degree subjective. You may (as I do) find Art Spiegelman’s Maus a tedious, pompous slog, but that’s a judgment about which reasonable people may differ (even if, of course, all right-thinking people agree with me.) But “difficulty” seems to hold out the possibility of more objective standards—to assure us that these books, over here, by Joyce and Faulkner, are 1000 pounds of pure prose, while these books over there, by Stephenie Meyer or Tom Clancy, are sniveling 90-pound weaklings of meretriciousness. It’s as though “good” may be relative, but “tough” is always and everywhere the same.”

I think readability is a funny term to begin with, and we likely often tend to mean different things when we say Henry James is “difficult” or The Road is “difficult.” Sometimes it’s constructive and refreshing to pause and think about what we mean when and how we come to arrive at those value judgments.

There is a virtue in difficult reading — by which I think of as challenging, long, complex, or outside of our usual reading norms — but I wonder about the line of argument that suggests a stoic moral obligation to finish reading a book, no matter what (Tim Parks had a great read on this, via The New York Review of Books: “Why Finish Books?“).

The sociology of operating systems and user behavior is probably a whole topic of discussion unto itself, but some of the morsels of information about reading behavior unearthed by Oyster are fun: Android users appear to read at a quicker pace, and for longer durations of time, and are bigger comic book fans; iOS users prefer C.S. Lewis, books on happiness and read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (really?). None of this counts enough to draw any sweeping conclusions about Android user reading or iOS user reading, but wouldn’t it be interesting to know the reading preferences of Kindle users, or fiction/nonfiction reading preferences for phone vs. tablet users?

With Book It! commemorating its 30th anniversary by way of a Book It! Alumni program aimed at nostalgic thirty-somethings, Mental Floss has a great rundown on what it fairly accurately calls “a clever way to get kids and parents into Pizza Hut franchises—with some reading thrown in” (via mental_floss, “Pizza for Reading: Pizza Hut’s “Book It!“). I love books, and I love pizza — and I can’t help but wonder how much the extrinsically motivating pizza rewards encouraged reading habits for elementary school students.

More interesting still is the controversy and discussion on reading motivation for students, along with the complicated tension between education and corporate sponsored programs —

“The Book It! program was the subject of a 1999 study and scholarly paper. Titled “Effects of extrinsic reinforcement for reading during childhood on reported reading habits of college students” (Psychological Record, 1999, by Flora, S. R., & Flora, D. B.; full text), the paper characterized pizza as an “extrinsic reward” for reading, and analyzed survey data collected from college students, trying to determine how the pizza rewards (and other extrinsic rewards like cash payments) affected students’ reading behavior”

Accurate numbers seem to be difficult to come by — but it’s unquestionable that the Book It! program has reached a very large number of students over three decades, with estimates claiming a total of 54 billion minutes of reading time (!), and one in five (!!) Americans having participated in the Book It! program since 1984 (via Mashable, “Were you a Pizza Hut BOOK-IT! Kid?“).

I wish grownups could get pizza for reading books. Actually, Book It! for grownups sounds like a great idea.

Social media has become so ubiquitous a part of our everyday lives (depending of course on what we define as “social media”), it might sometimes be helpful for us to take a step back and think about just how much has changed in terms of the ways in which we now interact with one another.

And let’s be honest: we don’t really know, because we’re too busy being immersed in an online, hyper-connected world of apps and websites and alerts that is constantly changing (remember when The Facebook used to look like this?).

In looking at Election Day 2010, the research team showed the ways both subtle and direct, that social cues affect our decision-making process. This in itself may not be news, but the ways in which we take those social cues has certainly changed. Could a simple nudge such as a Vote badge on Facebook be enough to generate additional votes? Do we use social media as a means to broaden our understanding of others and other viewpoints, or do we hear only what we want to hear, and block out the rest?

The role that social media is playing in the potentially historic September 18 Scottish Independence referendum is becoming quite a story in itself. How is social media (specifically, platforms such as Twitter and Facebook) helping to shape and promote the kind of discourse and debate surrounding the independence referendum?

“There were 186,267 Tweets about the Scotland #IndyRef debate tonight, with a peak of 2,019 Tweets per minute (TPM)”

My favorite part was the live interactive map which shows the Yes/No Twitter activity unfold in real time. It’s an unique look into what a massive, rapid, shared experience social media can create (click on the image below to view the full, and very cool interactive map):

While the announcement comes in the context of always-on branding and marketing opportunities (which does make a whole lot of sense) geared towards social media managers, I think this could have much broader implications for the ways in which we observe how social interactions unfold on a large scale.

[click on the image below to go to an interactive demo of the visualization tool]”

From the Twitter UK blog: “We hope you’ll be fascinated by the scale and predictability of conversation patterns across Britain. Be it how chatter about coffee as it lights up the map between 8-10 a.m. during the week, or how much we all seem to like talking about the weather, the patterns of discussion give a unique insight into the rhythm of everyday life in the UK and Ireland.”

Aside from the national obsession with weather (silly British people), the ebb and flow of a simultaneous, shared conversation between millions of Twitter users could give us great insight into the ways in which information flows from place to place and form person to person.

The “Kony 2012” documentary about the Ugandan warlord not only reached millions upon millions of social media users on an emotional level (while generating A LOT of hype), it only served as a cautionary tale about what kinds of messages social media campaigns promulgate.

Dr. Sarah Steele and I have researched the subject of social media advocacy in-depth (with the final article coming soon in 2015):

Liberal arts: useful in Silicon Valley? It’s not an entirely new debate, although it does seem to be picking up slightly more steam in the past year or two. The Economist has a quick blog post, on Stanford University’s role in such a possible Tech Age Renaissance: “A Florence for the 21st Century”

‘The Palo Alto-based university is trying to help answer one of the questions that haunts our “knowledge society”: where will new ideas come from? Many successful start-ups are the result of their founders spotting gaps in their own lives. But what if their thinking stretched far beyond their daily horizon? “The labour market is a rat race, so you’re in a permanent state of distraction,” notes Wiley Hausam, the executive director of Stanford’s new Bing Concert Hall (pictured). “Art stops all of that and allows creative ideas to emerge almost on their own.”’

It’s a somewhat romantic, but not entirely farfetched idea: “Stanford has been the catalyst of the Silicon Valley revolution, and we want to have the same effect on the arts … The Bay Area has the human and material resources needed to become the Florence of the 21st century.” Palo Alto: artistic community? And what kind of artists can afford Palo Alto rent prices anyways?